Re-Makes Considered Better Than the Originals? (1 Viewer)

[Darren Haycock]

Rollerball, baby, Rollerball!
Seriously though, I did like Ocean's 11 quite a bit, but then again, I haven't seen the original. There's some classics that never should be touched. The Truth About Charlie? Blasphemy!

 

[Steve_Ch]

>>Rollerball, baby, Rollerball!

 

[Damin J Toell]

FWIW, my father has always maintained that Mutiny on the Bounty 1962 is preferrable to its 1935 counterpart.

DJ

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

How about OCEAN'S ELEVEN.

This is a biggie with me. While even George Clooney and Brad Pitt don't have the coolness of the Rat Pack, Soderbergh's direction makes this film much slicker than the original could hope to be.

I never understood why the studios are always remaking the classics: do they expect anything but a feeble imitation? If more remakes would be from mediocre films with interesting premises, I think you'd get a better crop of remakes.

 

[Jason_Els]

Wow, this is a great list!

I agree completely with Imitation of Life. The acting is great and I like how they didn't make Annie into Aunt Jemima like the original. And Marion Anderson at the end..... it's like the voice of heaven.

The silents I'm kinda sorta staying away from comparing to talkies, otherwise there'd be quite a few like Frankenstein which would qualify but it seems very hard to judge given that silents are such a different genre. I'm not sure we can appreciate all but a handful in the way they were meant to be appreciated. Our cultural frame of reference is so different.

My great grandmother was a silent film actress back in the days when films were being made out on Long Island and upstate New York. My grandmother would tell me about how she would watch her mother on the sets and how they would go to watch movies ALL the time. Honestly 4 or 5 nights a week wouldn't be unusual. My grandmother never felt that people looked unnatural or that the sets, costumes, and effects were cheesy; and she saw them all from the Griffith epics to the awful "penny dreadful" serials to a few that actually had actors synching the lines! Her main complaint, quite justified, was that silent films shown these days looked awful. They were shown at the wrong frame rate and the quality of the film, "just looks old". The concept of acting in those days was just entirely different from The Method acting we see today. She remembers seeing Sarah Bernhardt on the screen and thinking she looked silly but then she saw her on stage and thought her "just the bees knees". So even then people could tell stage acting from film acting yet the acting at the time was so different.

Nothing personifies this so much as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Swanson hit the nail on the head. We see her acting as Norma in some scenes just like a modern-day actress yet when she tries to seduce Joe or, in the scene at the end, she turns on the "silent screen" acting that, in a talkie, seems bizarre but would otherwise fit in the silent world. Swanson's Norma keeps going back to her golden years when she's desperate. It makes her character almost macabre in her preternatural movements and grotesque expressions.

So this is why I'm trying to avoid the silent/sound comparison though I'm sure in some cases it's perfectly valid.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

In the case of The Thing, the 80s version is much closer to the original short story. Effects technology of the 50s couldn't really do a transforming monster, so they had to drop a huge part of the story.

 

[SpenceJT]

Battlefield Earth!

Yeah I know that there hasn't been a re-make but this movie qualifies because no remake could possibly be worse!

 

[Kenneth English]

Battlefield Earth!

Yeah I know that there hasn't been a re-make but this movie qualifies because no remake could possibly be worse!

True. However, I think that's a unique case where nothing and no one could ever make a watchable version of such a stupid, stupid, stupid book.

 

[chung_sotheby]

How about Psycho! It must be better, because it is the same shot for shot, plus it was done in COLOR!

But for real, remakes that I though were better not just because they adhere to the Ted Turner school of thought:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (though some might prefer Purple Noon, which is fantastic in its own right)

Dangerous Liasons (Again, althought the Vadim version is very good)

Romeo & Juliet (1968)

Unfaithful

Twelve Monkeys

Brazil (kind of a remake)

Hamlet (1996) Mind you, it is a little overblown and long, but I still prefer it over the Mel Gibson version

Gladiator - Much better than its original, Braveheart

Mind you, all of these are debateable

 

[Lew Crippen]

Hamlet (1996) Mind you, it is a little overblown and long, but I still prefer it over the Mel Gibson version

Ok I’ll start the debate.

Is it better than the 1948 version? Larry knew a thing or two about playing Shakespeare.

 

[TheLongshot]

If more remakes would be from mediocre films with interesting premises, I think you'd get a better crop of remakes.

I tend to agree, tho it kinda misses the point of doing a remake, from the studio perspective. (see above)

Jason

 

[ChuckSolo]

Are you sure that "Gladiator" was a remake of "Braveheart?" I know that there are distinct similarities between "Gladiator" and the old Stephen Boyd, Alec Guiness, and Sophia Loren movie "The Fall of the Roman Empire." The only remakes I would consider equal to or better than the original are:

The Fly
The Thing
Cape Fear
Alien (questionably a remake of "It, the Thing From Beyond Space")


Most others left me flat. The worst remakes, IMHO, would be "The Haunting","The Time Machine", and "The House on Haunted Hill", and....... "Pale Rider" (an obvious, and shameful ripoff of "Shane") All pretty laughable remakes.

 

[Patrick McCart]

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is better than the 1978 film and the TV movie of Return of the King.

IMO, the 1959 Ben-Hur has some better points than the 1925 film....but the silent film has a lot of stuff better than the remake. Both are very different films, but I think the chariot race and the slave galley scenes are a lot better.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Mind you, I haven't seen many of original (or in some cases the remakes) films a few of you talk about, but here’s my list based on what I've seen.

Dracula : I much prefer the newer Ford-Coppola version to the Bela Legosi/Universal film from the 30's. Not only was it truer to the original novel, but I think everything from the set design, special effects, and casting were perfect (Especially Anthony Hopkins as VanHellsing "She is a whore of darkness, the devil's concubine! Ha Ha! while humping Quincy's leg).
However the silent Nosferatu was also quite good, but also very different, playing to the Dracula-as-Demon theme (And thus I don't group it with the later Dracula-as-Seducer films).

The Thing : The Rob Bottin shape shifting alien creature vs. the Frankenstein-Carrot of the original film is only one example of how possibly everything was done better in the 1981 remake.

Event Horizon : I still profess that this sci-fi horror film is a remake of the Disney sci-fi film The Black Hole .

Robocop: Much better than Frankenstein (any version) if you ask me.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie: Not the entire film, but the segment "Lover's Vow" is superior to the earlier version "The Woman of the Snow" from the Japanese film Kwaidan (Or kai-dan, or however you choose to spell it). Both are taken from the same ancient Japanese folktale, and the 1965 film is more historically accurate, I feel the 1990 remake is better, not only for its far superior production value and visual effects, but because the ending of the tale is far more tragic (maybe tragic is the wrong word, the events happen because of a choice the main character makes regarding his "Vow" in either version), and thus a bit more "horrific”, as a good horror film should be.
It's quite possible there are earlier, or even better versions of the original "Woman of the Snow" tale, I haven't seen them, or even heard of them, so I couldn't use them for this comparison.

 

[Jason_Els]

The Thing : The Rob Bottin shape shifting alien creature vs. the Frankenstein-Carrot of the original film is only one example of how possibly everything was done better in the 1981 remake.

I would tend to agree but for the fact one of my hobbies is growing carnivorous plants . The idea of Frankencarrot thus has a great deal of appeal to me so, along with a few other "vengeful vegetable" films, it has a special place in my heart.

.... damn, time to prick my finger for Orlok again.

 

[Dan D.]

As I turn off Showtime, I can quite definitely say Rollerball does NOT belong on this list! Rollercrap!

 

[Yee-Ming]

Twelve Monkeys and Brazil are remakes?

 

[Damin J Toell]

Twelve Monkeys and Brazil are remakes?

Twelve Monkeys might be considered "inspired by" La Jetée. I have no idea what Brazil is thought to be a remake of, as I don't think it has much relation to the 1944 film of the same title.

DJ

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

SpenceJT wrote:

Battlefield Earth!

Yeah I know that there hasn't been a re-make but this movie qualifies because no remake could possibly be worse!

Obviosly you never read the book from which that movie was made. Trust me, it is quite possible to remake that and produce a movie of equal, or maybe even worse quality.

 

[SpenceJT]

Obviously you never read the book from which that movie was made. Trust me, it is quite possible to remake that and produce a movie of equal, or maybe even worse quality.

Actually Paul, I have read the book and quite enjoyed it!

My statement was a simple fact that any future re-make, of Battlefield Earth could not possibly be worse than John Travolta's Battlefield Earth.

I would love SCI-FI Channel to do with Battlefield Earth, what they did with Frank Herbert's Dune. Only through a multi-hour mini series can a story be told that does justice to the book!